What if no one had ever told you that you belong to a particular race? What if no one ever told you that having a skin color made you different from many other people, or that the color of your skin defines who you are as a person?
A recent viral video featuring a spoken word piece by Prince Ea raises those questions that lead to many more. For instance, what if no one ever convinced you that one race of people are superior to others, or that the way one race does things is the correct way?
In a beautiful take on race as a social construct, Prince Ea invites readers to think about what race would mean to us if we had never been told that it makes us different from one another. He compares his skin, his entire body, to a car that he drives. It’s his car, he’s in it, but that car is not him.
This is not to be taken as a “let’s all be colorblind” kind of sentiment. The fact is that we have been taught that one race is superior to others, so the experience of non-white persons is an experience that those who do not have that experience will never understand. Living within that experience does affect who people are. Therefore, we do have to acknowledge those experiences and give space for them to be expressed without resorting to an insistence that the expression of those experiences are “race-baiting” or “divisive.”
The point of the amazing video is that everything we know about race, about racial difference, and about racial superiority or inferiority has been taught to us. These differences have been socially constructed and have no basis in scientific fact or biological difference. Race is simply what we have decided that it is.
